help thinking of Claudia’s List of the Apocalypse—stable income!—with a twinge of terror.
“Is that what you want too?”
“I’m not asking for analysis of my marriage.”
“No, you just want my money.” Max winked and laughed hoarsely. He caravanned three lumps of sugar over to his green tea and thrashed the spoon about in the cup, making a racket.
Jeremy struggled to direct this discussion back on the rails. “Let’s be serious here, OK? I know you have the money. Can you to loan it to us? We’ll pay it back with interest.”
Max sighed heavily. “Nothing would make me happier than having fifteen grand in my pocket to give you.”
“Not give, loan,” Jeremy interjected.
“Whatever, doesn’t matter either way, I’m broke.” He peered with dolorous eyes over the rim of his teacup, momentarily sincere. “Really, Jeremy, I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”
Jeremy watched his brilliant proposal whisked suddenly away, like a newspaper caught in a strong wind. “You’re broke? What happened to all that money you got in the divorce from Katya?”
“There wasn’t as much as you’d think. She had good lawyers. And I made some bad investments. Tried my hand at day-trading. Not a wise idea, it turned out.”
“I always figured you kept your money in a Swiss bank or tucked in a mattress.”
Max grunted. “I sleep on a futon now.” He sighed deeply, wiped the last curds of egg from his whiskers, and put the napkin on the table. “I’m going to have to find myself another rich wife one of these days.”
“Now that’s a healthy approach.” Jeremy hunched over and shoveled the last crumbs of crust into his mouth, unwilling to meet his father’s gaze. He felt petulant, against his own will and better judgment: He’d never asked much of his father, not when Max divorced Jillian and took off for that commune when Jeremy was only four; nor when Jillian died and Max could only make it back from Norway for two days for the funeral. Really, he’d been a goddamn saint, considering his father’s neglect. And now he’d finally used his get-out-of-jail-free card, asked this one favor, and Max couldn’t help him? Jeremy felt all those years of resentment flooding back—once again, he was the fourteen-year-old kid who had only distaste for the absentee dad who dropped in once every year or two with a backpack full of Free Mumia lapel pins or a custom-painted didgeridoo. Jeremy had thought he was over all that—that as an adult he’d finally gotten past the obvious Freudian abandonment hoo-ha and could actually admire his father’s genial self-assurance and blunt honesty and generally haphazard approach to life. He sometimes even recognized how some of these traits had been passed through the chains of DNA into his own personality (and certainly this was a result of nature, not nurture, since his father had done almost no nurturing at all). Not now. Now he just wanted to slug him.
“Don’t you judge me, kiddo. I’m the most content person you know. I’m doing just fine,” Max said. “Your generation has such angst. We didn’t worry about this kind of stuff. Mortgages! Retirement accounts! Therapy! Everyone in therapy. Talking talking talking and never doing.
How old are you—thirty-three now? Thirty-four? When I was your age, I was living with two women and a pet lion on a farm in upstate New York. I was blissfully happy.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about the lion before, Dad. It’s a harder world these days. A lot more ways to fuck things up.”
“Bullshit, Jeremy. Youth is timeless. You’re only as old as you think you are, no matter what year it may be.” Max stood, extricating a pouch of rolling tobacco from the thready back pocket of his corduroys. “Instead of running around trying to go even more deeply into debt than you already are, why don’t you just lose the house?”
“Lose the house?” Jeremy imagined driving up to their front door only to find the house gone, vanished, aimlessly wandered off to a suburb in Arizona, with only the exposed cement foundation marking the fact that someone had once lived a life there.
“Sell it. Get rid of it, and then you and Claudia go jaunt around the world a bit, act like the kids you are. Live the moment.”
Jeremy considered this in silence, stunned that he hadn’t considered this obvious solution earlier. “Well, thanks for the fatherly wisdom,” he finally muttered, but he was speaking to his father’s back: Max was shuffling down the patio stairs and out into the sun. Jeremy